15 comments:

Well it looked like a kind of brown/orangehaze pseudo-darkness to me... Shattuck as always a reddish toxic light-glow... dude, try the boat noodle house for late service.

(For years I read that as "Beat Noodle House".. but, you know, next door to Another Kind of Hobbit, Beat would be just a bit too close.)

Just between us, O, this post is what came of a gasping hike up to Indian Rock on Midsummer Night. Looking out toward the Gate from the old-folks' bench.. orange brown haze from here to Hawaii.

(By the way, the Yahi acorn-grinders who once used the Rock as a sort of grind-it-yourself cafeteria, would probably have welcomed you with a post-late-shift mash-broth and a view of... the whole Milky Way! If not the whole Snickers!)

If this sort of thing interests you, don't fail to click on the top image to get a glimpse of the thickest lace froth of artificial illumination on the planet, that emanating from the light-hives strung across the far right sectors of the NASA image.

i love that picture at the top. the nasa website says that: "This image has become an email-attachment phenomenon! It has also generated many print requests."it was taken in the year 2000. wonder what an updated one would look like.

No doubt you're right. There's probably a lot more of night left out there than there is of us here, defending ourselves from it inside our protective envelope of artificial light.

Mariana,

Well, I do miss the starlight.

Timmy,

"...it was taken in the year 2000. wonder what an updated one would look like."

I wondered too. I looked at a number of these NASA images and learned that the brightness-clusters on the maps appear to double in size and intensity about every ten years--of course the data collection only goes back a few decades. But they are compilation images that integrate data taken up over extended periods. The big image of Europe at night, for instance, was made from data recording only human-made lights, collected in 1994-95, compiled in 2001. So in these NASA images what we are seeing is the froth of Earthlight from a time when there was still comparatively more night remaining.

The shoals and nebulae of human earthlights seen from space seem even stranger the closer you look at the maps. On some projections there are patches of intense localized light created by the super-powerful halide lamps used by fishing fleets at night. The squid fleets of the South Atlantic throw up a brighter image than Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro.

Of course the opossums and sea turtles, badgers and swans, bats and frogs and seabirds can't sort out the data but that doesn't provide much consolation for the screwed up nesting and mating and migrating cycles, the songbirds colliding with brightly lit tall buildings or captured by gas flares on oil rigs. The more you read about these effects the easier it is to see that the biological rhythms of Earth are being thrown out of whack by all this wasted light prodigally spilled upward.

But Hey, as a friend wrote privately last night regarding this post, "Nature Bats Last".

My heavens, it looks like London has been the target of a meteorite or a nuclear weapon. One has read of the amazement of the citizens of the town upon the arrival of gaslight two hundred years ago. But one big halide lamp would probably overpower all the gaslight it would have taken to (partially) illuminate those dark streets for the hackneys.

Foam,

Yes. Gives rise to the question, would we rather live in a robot state and see the stars?

One thing that is not much emphasized about global warming is that as the ice melt the deserts expand. The famines of the Sahel and Ethiopia were in some parts created by our cars. On average and in European measures a car transform 300 grams of oxygen into 200 grams of CO2 by Km.

I recall, long ago, lying on the surface of the Earth, looking up at the night sky over the Sahara, and having the thought, are there as many grains of sand beneath my head as there are stars in that luminous blanket above?

Oxygen is rich with darkness,Carbon emits light.From the stars can strange eyesStill see our deserts at night?

St.Johnof the Cross....the light withinthe light without.......thelights of civilization are neutralto those locked in cells in darkness...they are what they areand progress does not solve theproblem of The Dark Night of the Soul.....but it helps some

It's late and getting later, but what's left of the functional cerebrum finds this dovetailing or doubling-back into the quoted Jacques Ellul bit in the reply to Lanny and Annie at the end of the thread on Bliss (above) (--or is it below? Which end of Nowhere is Up?)